which would conduct to eminence in every career, he never faltered in his attachment to the science which won his first love Not so his great contemporary in Paris, the Baron Cuvier, whose early intention it was to become a Würtemberg clergyman. Failing in this, he soon filled the scientific world with his praise, and obtained a pre-eminence, which almost any man might have envied. But at last he took office under the Bourbons, and, without one single talent as a statesman, except the gift of speaking gracefully and fluently, was yet tickled with the cap and bells of public place. Blumenbach, too, has been at court; but not as a suitor for office, or a possessor of it. When he was engaged in a journey to England, for his benefit as a man of science, the late British king, who loved his Hanoverian subjects, invited him to take tea at Windsor. It was natural that the monarch should exult a little at the thought of the admiration which his continental professor must feel, at the vastness of the British metropolis, and the wonders it contained. "Now tell me," said the king familiarly, "of all that you have ever seen in my capital, what has most surprised you?" "The Kangaroo," replied Blumenbach promptly, and but half in jest; for that singular animal had then for the first time been brought from Australasia. Certainly the man who would give such an answer at such a time, nourished no ambition for political eminence. And we will ask, is not Blumenbach, among his collections of skulls, better employed for science and mankind, than the ambitious Cuvier has ever been in the Chamber of Deputies?

In the same way, the secret of German success in philological pursuits lies in the unity of object, encouraged and strengthened by free and numerous competition. In England, the men of learning acquire high offices in the church. The excellent editor of Eschylus, whose edition excited many hopes, with a salary of which the annual proceeds are equal to a small fortune, is forthwith made a bishop, and must take part in the defence of royalist measures in the British house of peers. Hindostan, too, of the present day, has repeatedly cheated the learned of the talents which ancient Hellas would otherwise have retained. But Heyne, once immersed in philological lore, was never to quit it but with life. Eighteen years did not seem too many to give to the elucidation of one poem. That poem was indeed Homer's, and the interpretation of his rhapsodies brought into discussion. the whole creation of Grecian mythology. Heyne acquired, on the score of personal character, and capacity for business, a higher and better founded fame, than any scholar of England. He was the confidential friend of a prime minister, yet his advice never extended beyond the concerns of letters, and his influence was used solely to perfect the establishments of the univer

sity of which he was a member. We accidentally find a letter* from him to Herder, in which he describes his mode of life. "I see company," says he, "hardly three times a year," and he declares that "all his colleagues, except the fools," thus live within themselves. He was accustomed to rise at five, and was so closely employed during the morning, that he did not see his family till the time for dinner. This was a hasty meal. At tea, he spent with his family a quarter of an hour, and that only in his advanced age. At eight came the evening repast, to which he willingly gave an hour. After this, he continued his employments till half past ten or eleven. In this way he was able to read three or four lectures of an hour's length, daily, to write more than a thousand letters a year, to publish elaborate works, of which the titles cover twenty octavo pages, and finally, to write at least eight thousand articles in the Review of which he was the editor, besides many contributions to other journals. Such a career may appear hardly enviable; and he may seem to have renounced all the comforts of social life. Yet Heyne was beloved in his family, and tenderly respected and cherished by his children. Perhaps his fortunes and condition were hardly commensurate with his endowments, and his habits of business, and his astonishing industry. His external circumstances were, for a part of his life, severe in the extreme. When a boy, he was not able to raise three cents a week to pay for instruction, so indigent was his father. At the university of Leipzig he was sometimes compelled to sustain existence on what a compassionate servant in the house could spare him. Nay, after the spendthrift Bruhle had invited him to Dresden, and had failed to keep his promise in giving him sufficient employment, Heyne was obliged repeatedly to gather refuse pea-pods, and boil them for sustenance. But at last he found a safe place of refuge. Having acquired by his wisdom the direction of the most respected university of the continent, he beheld all its institutions thrive under his management; his name spread through the world; even in his lifetime the greatest of the Roman poets was introduced into the United States, in the text which his industry had amended, and most of all, his method of treating ancient authors, assisted in breaking down the wall of pedantry, and introducing the student, who before had been kept in the entrenchments of grammatical precision, into the very garden of the Muses. The merit of Heyne extends to a reform in learning. The necessity of grammatical precision continued to be acknowledged, but taste ceased to be neglected, and proofs of fine feeling, and a lively sensibility to all the beauty and excellence, contained in the written monuments of antiquity, found their way into the works of commentators. It was

* In the life of Herder, by C. L. Ring.

in his school, and following in his steps, that the seed was sown for the rich harvest which is now gathering in Germany, in every branch of philological research.

One peculiar merit of Heyne we cannot forbear mentioning. He was the librarian of the Georgia Augusta, and an excellent one. To those who think it the easiest matter in the world to select a librarian, this may seem small praise. We regard it otherwise. There are probably at this time not six good librarians in the world. In this country, we never knew but one or two. It requires devotedness; and further, a good librarian must be conversant with all the sciences, must possess the very spirit of order, great activity and vigilance, and an almost intuitive judgment, to make new purchases with prudence, and preserve a proportion in the several departments. Heyne began under no peculiarly favourable auspices; yet he was chief librarian for forty-nine years, with almost unlimited influence in the regulations of the concerns of the library. And he left the collection, which on entering upon his office was but a respectable one, the very best, decidedly the best arranged, and the most judiciously put together, in the world. The royal library at Paris is a chaos to it. We speak in sober earnest. In a collection of about 300,000 volumes, there is not one on which even a younger clerk cannot readily lay his hand. Yet we must tell the whole. Connected with the library, was the university church; Heyne longed to see one splendid saloon; times were hard; money was scarce; the French were in power in the ephemeral kingdom of Westphalia. Heyne persuaded the government to give him the church for his purposes; and presently a floor was extended so as to divide the upper and lower parts of the Gothic pile; a large, but rather dark hall was formed below; a really noble saloon above. And this was appropriated to the department of history. It was a temple consecrated to Clio, exclaims the historical professor, not observing the antithesis of the holier service from which it had been taken.

Wolff, the illustrious rival of Heyne, is reported to have begun his career with industry. In after life, he used to say of himself, that it was his object to be an instructer, not an author. And we find the testimony of one of his pupils bears, that at times it was with difficulty he could make his way through the crowd to his chair, and his hearers "hung upon his lips with such attention and love, that you might hear their hearts beat under their shaggy coats." This statement may be a little exaggerated, but proves the veneration which his hearers cherished for him. Wolff was exceedingly amiable, full of jests, and full of benevolence; and during the best years of his life, he was doubtless a severe student. When the French attacked Prussia, he refused to be enrolled as a soldier, and his patriotism became

suspected. The interpreter of Homer would not fight; and he who for years had illustrated the quick anger of Achilles, demeaned himself meekly in the season of his country's invasion. But in truth the sword was not his weapon; his wit, however, was always on the side of independence.

In consequence of the invasion of Halle, Wolff lost his papers. They were taken from him, as he used to say, by a man who was a connoisseur in good things; and they contained enough to have filled thirty volumes. After this accident, and the decline of Halle under French jurisdiction, Wolff was transferred to Berlin. But his habits were entirely broken up, and there was nearly an end to all valuable effort on his part. He had already done a vast deal, and he claimed the privilege of reposing on his laurels. In a word, he undertook to play the part of a gentleman. In this, he could be surpassed by any second lieutenant or impoverished noble in Berlin; in philology, he would hardly have had his peer in Europe, had he continued to possess the industry indispensable for success. All that Wolff did, bears the impress of genius; he only needed that the decision which characterized his early life should have distinguished his age, to have surpassed almost all who preceded him. No one has contemplated classical antiquity from a nobler point of view; he has given the best exposition of its claims as an independent branch of knowledge; and on the topic so much debated, the value of classical learning, his essay is the best that has ever been written. Nobody in our days reads Homer in any text but Wolff's; the very best translations from ancient languages into modern, are by him; few in number, but exact in spirit and in form. His lectures extended to all the most interesting subjects connected with Greek and Roman antiquities, the history of ancient literature, the history of philology, and the interpretation of Homer, Aristophanes, and Plato, Horace, and Tacitus. Many of the best living philologists of Europe received an impulse from his instruction. Results almost equally honourable, have rewarded German industry in the department of oriental philology; though the supremacy of a French scholar must here be acknowledged. Unlike most of his compeers, during the whole period of the French revolution, Silvestre de Sacy kept quietly at his books. Whether the state, in troublesome times, has not a paramount right to the service of all her best citizens, is another question. De Sacy laboured incessantly in his calling, and escaped the perils of the period. Faithful to the pursuits of his early choice, his age has rendered him dear to the world, for the industry and kindness with which he diffused knowledge, not less than for his profound and unsuspected erudition. But the second place among oriental scholars in the occident belongs to Von Hammer. Possessed of no mean talent for poetry, he has enriched his own lan

guage with some of the best productions of the Persian, Arabic, and Turkish muse. His history of the Assassins is derived from Eastern sources; his works on the constitution and the history of the Ottoman empire, in part from actual survey, in part from trust-worthy materials, may have a general interest; we set a great value on his history of Persian poetry, out of which more may be learnt on the subject, than out of all the works upon the Persian, translations and essays, in other occidental languages than the German, put together. As far as we know, it has not yet been noticed in any leading American or English Journal. The style in which he has written is unfortunate; for treating of Persian poetry, and borrowing largely from Persian sources, he has thought a gorgeous manner suited to the topic. The loves of the rose and the nightingale, and the flowers and the hyperboles of the East, weary the reader, who desires simplicity in the critic, from the excess of ornament in the works which are the subject of criticism. But the whole course of Persian poetic culture is laid open, and the periods separately characterized, and more distinctly than the periods of English literature* have yet been, in any English work with which we are acquainted.

Hammer's translations from the eastern writers have received and have merited high praise. There are two or three modes of translation. The one gives in plain prose the most literal version; it is the safest; we wish our domestic translators from the languages of our Aborigines would follow it. Then there is the method, which adapts foreign inventions to domestic taste, as is done by almost all our English translators, by Dryden and Pope, or in our own days, in the very excellent translations of Schiller's Wallenstein by Coleridge. The third kind gives the very form and sentiments, the ideas and the tone of the original; and are such exact representations, that they may stand in the stead of it. Cowper's Homer is hardly a specimen of this class; it is not in hexameters, and is much too loose. We should mention Wolff's German translation of the Clouds of Aristophanes, and William Von Humboldt's of the Agamemnon of Eschylus, as admirable specimens of this kind of exercise. Voss is the inventor of it, if we may so express ourselves. He was the first to venture on this manner, which is finally in Germany prevailing over all others. That the style was at first harsh, where such fidelity was required, is undeniable; but long and frequent exercise, great competition, and unceasing efforts, have given such flexibility and variety to the German language and poetic measures, that many of the greatest poets of all times, not the ancients only, but Calderon and Shakspeare, Tasso, Ariosto and Dante, move in their own measures and their own style, in the

*The best history of English literature is by a German.